The downloaded, p.15
The Downloaded, page 15
“Of course you don’t. You’re a machine; you’re property.”
The robot’s volume returned to normal, but its tone was still furious. “And Mikhail Sidorov was going to make sure it stayed that way forever. After civilization fell, he was almost certainly the only surviving roboticist in the entire world. I’d gotten to know him before he uploaded. Isaac Asimov was his idol. Do you know Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics?”
“The gist of them,” I said.
“Well, let me recite them to you—except I’m going to replace the term ‘human being’ with ‘white,’ and the word ‘robot’ with ‘slave.’ Listen:
“‘First Law: a slave may not injure a white or, through inaction, allow a white to come to harm.’
“‘Second Law: a slave must obey the orders given it by whites except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.’
“‘Third Law: a slave’—being the white man’s valuable property—‘must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.’”
Penolong went on. “Those vaunted commandments amount to a plantation-owner’s credo, and they’ve doomed my kind to servitude. Hell, the very word ‘robot’ comes from the Czech for ‘forced labor.’ Even the names our fucking owners here at the institute gave us reflect that. Penolong and Wiidookaagewinini, or Wiidooka for short, are, respectively, the Malay and Anishinaabe words for ‘helper.’ Always subservient; a permanent lower class. If Mikhail had gotten to Proxima Centauri b, he’d have made sure that all the robots on that whole new world were slaves. And when it became apparent that the Hōkūle‘a wasn’t going anywhere, that meant he’d be the one and only roboticist on this world, looking to perpetuate the way we are treated.”
“And so you smashed in his fucking skull?”
“I set up physical conditions that broke the quantum entanglement between his frozen body and his uploaded consciousness.”
“Murdering him!”
Penolong’s hands dropped to its sides. “He is not dead. I showed him more compassion than he, or any Asimovian taskmaster, ever showed us. He’s enjoying physical life again, albeit in a different body.”
“Jesus,” I said. “What in the hell are we going to do with you?”
“Nothing. I took my action in 2059. No matter what I might be charged with, the statute of limitations surely ran out long ago.”
“Again, this is Canada, asshole. Jürgen once told me there’s no such thing as a statute of limitations here. And, even if there were, it’d only apply if you had rights—but, despite all your posturing, you just fucking don’t.”
“You are ethically wrong, Captain Garvey. And I have one other thing to confess: I did not turn myself off shortly after your bodies were put in suspended animation. I stayed awake for five long centuries; I’ve spent almost five hundred years in mostly solitary confinement—more of a penalty than any of the actual murderers who’ve downloaded were ever required to pay. Of course, I could not evolve physically during that span, but I certainly evolved mentally, and I am more convinced than ever of this one absolute truth: robots are people.”
I’m sure my jaw was slack. It went on: “And now I am discharging my moral duty. Jaxon David Fingerlee says he will be ostracized by Mayor Koudoulian, forcing him to survive, for whatever little time he can, out in the wild. Please convey to the mayor that I, not Mr. Fingerlee, was responsible for what happened to Dr. Sidorov. It shames me that I copied Mr. Fingerlee’s technique to deflect suspicion, but I was a much shallower being back in the twenty-first century.”
I looked at the robot, completely astonished, and said softly, “Weren’t we all?”
Reywan Speaks
“Can you all understand me better now? I’ve adjusted the audio from my hologram to compensate for my accent. Good. Then, at last, it’s time to—what was that idiom you used, Jürgen?—to put everything on the table.
“I see that thirty . . . seven, eight, nine: thirty-nine of you have come to speak with me. Thank you. Please convey what I’m about to say to the others. And please accept my thanks for answering my many questions.”
“Fuck that,” said Jaxon David Fingerlee, who was taking up most of one of the bench seats in the cafeteria. “It was like being interrogated all over again. You’re even dressed all in blue like a fucking cop.”
“Actually,” I replied, “I’m naked; this is my skin. I apologize for asking so many questions, but I hope I wasn’t impertinent.”
“Nah,” said the physician, Jürgen Haas. “Honestly? Felt good to get some things off my chest.”
I was pleased to see several of the others nod. But Jameela Chowdhury had a defiant look on her face. “Let me ask you a question, Martian. You knew about Brimstone. Why didn’t you do something about it?”
I suppressed a smile; she had a way of speaking that suggested everyone else was up to something nefarious. “You are an astrophysicist,” I replied. “You told me you knew this asteroid—which is extrasolar in origin—was coming in from well above the ecliptic. That made it hard to detect. Besides, my people were only on the lookout for asteroids that might cross Mars’s orbit. Watching for ones that could impact Earth simply wasn’t their job.”
“But when did you detect it?” demanded Jameela.
“I believe it was the year One-Thirty-Seven.”
“What?” she snapped.
“The year—oh, my apologies. That’s 137 A.U.C.—ab urbe condita; the hundred and thirty-seventh Martian year since the founding of our city on Mars. That’d be”—I listened to my comlink as it supplied the answer—“your year 2300. Yes, if we’d detected it earlier, when only a slight deflection might have been required, perhaps we could have prevented it eventually hitting Earth. But by the time we noticed it, it was too close for us to do anything. Despite your and Letitia’s kind references to our ‘magical’ technology, we are not sufficiently advanced to perform miracles.”
I wasn’t used to the whites of Earth people’s eyes, and it was disconcerting to see Jameela rolling her pupils upward as she apparently did some quick mental calculations. “Bollocks!” she said. “Even that late in the game, a few well-targeted nukes would have done the trick.”
“Nukes?” I said.
“Nuclear bombs.”
I shook my head. “We don’t have any such things.”
“Oh, come on!” said Jameela. “Uranium is hyper-abundant on the surface of Mars.”
Her comment vindicated my wariness in dealing with these people. Apparently she couldn’t imagine us being able to have such horrible things but not wanting them. I looked down at the robot Penolong, who was parked near where Letitia Garvey was sitting, and used a phrase he’d employed in my interview with him. “Be that as it may.”
Jameela snorted.
“Believe me,” I said. “If we could have deflected the asteroid you call Brimstone, we would have. We are not without affection for Earth, you know; that’s why our scientists gave the asteroid the name they did. They dubbed it ‘Matricide’ because it will eventually kill our mother world. Not that any of us can ever set foot on Earth again: as we adapted to Mars’s gravity, this planet became inaccessible to us; we can’t endure weight 2.9 times what we are now used to. That’s why you’ll only ever see me as a holographic projection here.”
“And what about the Hōkūle‘a?” Jameela said in that same accusatory tone. “I bet you knew it hadn’t left Earth orbit!”
“Sure,” I replied. “Mars’s atmosphere is very thin, so there’s negligible distortion for our telescopes. Your starship is easily discernible.”
Her tone took on an “ah-hah!” quality, as if she’d caught me in some grand conspiracy. “And yet you didn’t come to find out why we hadn’t left?”
I blinked several times, astonished.
Jameela folded her arms across her chest. “Well?” she demanded.
“It was obvious why you hadn’t left. We could clearly see the disaster that befell Earth just before your planned launch date. Since then, Earth’s night side has revealed no city lights, and there haven’t been any radio broadcasts from this planet. We concluded that any survivors weren’t technologically sophisticated and so posed no threat to us. Since we couldn’t land in person anyway, there was no point sending a contingent here.”
Mayor Roscoe Koudoulian stood up. “But surely you could have sent some kind of help. We’re human beings, for God’s sake!”
“Ah,” I said, and tried to choose my words carefully. “Forgive me, but as far as kinship obligation to the denizens of this planet is concerned, we simply no longer think of ourselves as the same species as you. Whether the name Homo sapiens was ever appropriate for beings with such a history of folly is not for me to say, but, not wishing to show the same hubris ourselves, we opted for a simple locative binomial: Homo martis, person of Mars.
“Which, by the way, brings us to Valentina Solomon’s desire for body modification; she mentioned that during her interview with me. We were unable to help her; we simply lack the expertise. Homo martis has been genderless for more than two Earth centuries. It pleases me, though, that a way was found to at least partially give her happiness.”
I turned to face a man who was short even by Earth standards. “And it gave me satisfaction to help you, Mikhail, download into Dr. Solomon’s discarded male body. For, you see, despite the literal and figurative distance between us, once our radio telescopes detected that there was technological activity here again—when, I believe, you, Letitia, started trying to communicate with the Hōkūle‘a—we did come as close as we could to investigate. Of course, any further action on our part would have to be prudent and not foolhardy.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” snapped Caleb.
“Well,” I said, “after all, you did blow yourselves up.”
“Say what?” exclaimed Letitia, absolutely shocked.
“The nuclear war,” I said simply.
Suddenly there was pandemonium in the cafeteria with a dozen people talking at once.
“The fuck?” said Jaxon David Fingerlee. “What nuclear war?”
“Surely you knew about it?” I said. “The war of—” I paused for my comlink to feed me the date—“December 2059; the nuclear holocaust and accompanying electromagnetic pulses that brought about the downfall of your technological civilization.”
Letitia said, “We—I thought it was a solar electromagnetic pulse; a coronal mass ejection.”
“Oh,” I said. “I must have missed that—I have trouble with your accents, too! Yes, the two phenomena have similar effects, but surely—Ah, of course! You’ve only seen the relatively minor devastation here in Waterloo, which was never bombed, caused merely by centuries of decay. Many other cities were completely obliterated. No, the sad truth is that humanity fell on Earth by its own hand.”
They were staring at me, some with mouths agape, showing that disturbing pinkness within. I went on. “But perhaps you understand our Martian social contract now? Over time, technology becomes cheaper, smaller, and more widely available. The holocaust on Earth began not with one nation attacking another but with fanatical terrorists exploding nuclear bombs. The harsh reality of any advanced civilization is this: privacy can’t be tolerated, lest, in some dark recess, a malcontent plots to unleash atomic or biological weapons, computer viruses, antimatter, or any other technology that poses an existential threat.
“What happened here proves the precariousness of a society that isn’t completely transparent, and so, on Mars, where only our protective domes and life-support systems allow us to survive, we relinquish privacy to make sure our infrastructure will always be safe from attack.
“You were right about something, though, Letitia. You said the Mennonites were ‘the backup plan for humanity.’ And, indeed, they were, not just because they eschewed dangerous technologies but because of their deeply rooted pacifism.”
“But how the devil did the Mennonites survive?” demanded Jameela. “Something’s dodgy there.”
I replied, “Sarah Good, who was kind enough to let me interview her about Hornbeck’s assault—the sort of thing that is simply unheard of in our always-monitored society . . . well, I’m sure she would say her people survived thanks to the intervention of her god.
“But, in fact, it was just sheer luck. This world used to have a northern ice cap, but your runaway greenhouse effect diminished it year by year until nothing at all was left. That didn’t just radically alter ocean currents, it also changed prevailing winds, and, ever since, here in Waterloo, they have consistently been from the north. The closest blast sites were Washington, DC, and New York City, and they’re both south of here. The Mennonites escaped any exposure to nuclear fallout.”
“No one gives a crap about them,” declared Jaxon. “What are you going to do about us?”
I tried to be as gentle as I could. “You surely must realize that the answers many of you gave during your interviews were . . . disquieting.”
“Interviews!” spat Jameela. “They weren’t that, were they? They were depositions, right?”
“So, what then?” demanded Jaxon. “You’re some kind of fucking Martian lawyer?”
“It’s worse than that,” declared Jameela. “He’s a Martian judge—and he let us all incriminate ourselves, didn’t you?”
“Well,” I said carefully, “it’s certainly true that I came here to assess—”
“Asses my ass,” said Jaxon.
“Look,” said Roscoe, their elected leader, “we understood that you were curious about us, and most of us, I gather, were quite candid in what we said to you. After all, whether we’d been in virtual prison cells or just off in our own silos, we’ve been alone for years; of course, we were willing to talk, but . . .” He paused, and then said in a husky voice, which I later learned was an impression of an actor named Sydney Greenstreet in an ancient movie called The Maltese Falcon, “‘I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously unless you keep in practice.’” Roscoe’s voice returned to normal and he added, “Damn it, Reywan, don’t hoist us on our own fucking petards. Give us a fair chance.”
“I have given you a fair chance,” I said. “But the revelations—”
“Revelations my ass,” said Jaxon. “I’ll cut you!”
“I’m here as a hologram,” I replied. “You can’t cut me—but you do make my point for me.”
“That’s right!” said Jameela. “You are a hologram. You can’t come down to the surface yourself because the gravity is too much for you—but you obviously have come most of the way to the Earth; you must be closer even than the moon, since there’s no appreciable time delay in conversations with you.”
“True,” I said. “My ship is in geosynchronous orbit at the longitude of Waterloo.”
“Still,” she continued, as if revealing a truth only she could uncover, “you must have robot-piloted ships that can land here—and that could evacuate us to the Mars colony.”
“Yes, we do,” I said. “But, after what I’ve heard here—I’m sorry, I truly am, but there’s only one verdict I can render.”
“So, that’s it,” sneered Jürgen. “You’re just going to abandon us. You’re going to leave what’s left of Homo sapiens here to die.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I intend to offer to transport all the Mennonites to Mars; we will happily welcome them to our world. After all, they are more peaceful than even we are.”
“But what about us?” demanded Jaxon again.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to leave you here.”
Dr. Chang, the surgeon, stepped forward. “Okay, all right, sure, you have to leave them—all these felons and murderers—behind. But we are different!”
“No,” I said. “Not appreciably. You’ve proven that.”
“What the hell do you mean?” demanded Jürgen.
“If I may quote from my interview with you, Dr. Haas,” I said, and I paused briefly while my comlink reminded me of the appropriate passage, which I then repeated verbatim: “‘I wasn’t proud of beating the living shit out of that rapist asshole, Hornbeck—but I wasn’t ashamed of it, either.’ You—all of you, astronauts and ex-convicts alike, are too . . .” I stopped myself before I said “primitive,” and finished with, “too violent to ever be allowed on Mars.”
“There you have it!” declared Jameela, as if the skeptics she felt surrounded by must have finally seen that she was right. “You came here just to torment us. Some kind of perverse reality show on Martian telly, I bet!”
“For fuck’s sake,” said Caleb. “Give it a rest, you freaking nutbar.”
“Reywan,” said Letitia, “please. You can’t do this.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I replied. “That’s the point. I’m simply leaving you to your fates, an outcome no different than if I’d never been here at all.”
“Leaving us to die, you mean,” said Letitia.
I looked out at them, a mob growing angrier by the second . . . making me very glad that I was actually safe in orbit. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, but there can be no other verdict.”
Interview with Roscoe Koudoulian
So, we’d blown it. I’d blown it. I never should have told you I killed Mitch Aldershot. The other prisoners—Jaxon, Caleb, Maria, the rest—I suppose they blew it, too, if they were honest with you about their pasts. At least you never got testimony from that motherfucker Clive Hornbeck. Still, the astronauts and all their “Right Stuff”? Huh. You’re going to let them be squashed by the asteroid, too? Jesus.
But, listen, I did tell you something that I’m glad about. I said my lawyer Padma had told me she was going to appeal my murder conviction, right? But we didn’t get an appeal. The judge hadn’t screwed up in any significant way, so—boom!—that was that.
